Poet George Russell clearly had some trepidation when heasked his friend and fellow writer James Joyce to submit ashort story to Irish Homestead, a periodical he was editingfor the Irish Agricultural Organization Society. It was thesummer of 1904, and Joyce hadn't yet published any fiction—his focus hitherto had been on poetry and drama—buthe had made a reputation as a gadfly andiconoclast, quick to denounce and ready toshock all and sundry with his unconventionalviews.

That is, if and when they could understandhim. Joyce was known as much for hisobscure and indirect communications asfor his rebellious temperament. During hisdays at University College, a journalist hadwritten in response to one of Joyce's fierypublic pronouncements: "Everyone said itwas divine, but no one seemed quite toknow what it meant." Joyce’s nicknameamong his college peers at the time was the Mad Hatter.

Russell offered a pound in payment. "It is easily earnedmoney," he promised, adding, “if you can write fluently anddon't mind playing to the common understanding and liking foronce in a way." Russell wanted something simple and rural,but realizing how little these adjectives described Joyce'spublic persona, he conceded that Joyce could publish undera pseudonym.

Joyce derided the periodical, which he later referred tocontemptuously as "the pigs’ paper," but this offer of a quidhad quite an impact on 20th century literature. Joyce nowturned his attention to fiction, and conceived of the idea of aseries of short stories—or epicleti as he called them (although epicleses is the proper term) in reference to the invocationof the Holy Spirit in Eastern Rite Christianity—that resultedin his book Dubliners. As Joyce explained to his brotherStanislaus, he saw a "certain resemblance between themystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do." Joyce alsodecided upon the pseudonym Stephen Daedalus, a namethat (with a slightly different spelling) would serve as theauthor’s literary alter ego in his later novels.

But after this promising start, Joyce would encounter alegion of difficulties in completing and publishing Dubliners. Irish Homestead accepted three of his stories—"TheSisters," "Eveline" and "After the Races"—but the editorrejected his fourth submission "Clay" because he hadreceived so many letters of complaint from readers inresponse to the earlier tales. Joyce continued writing thestories, and looked to publish the them as a book. Butpotential publishers had even more objections than the readersof Irish Homestead. A full decade elapsed between Joyce'sfirst vision of Dubliners and its long-delayed release.

Joyce approached 15 different publishers, some of them morethan once, before he found one brave enough to take on thebook. His merits as a writer were not in question, but ratherthe fear of legal repercussions. As early as 1905, GrantRichards had agreed to release the book, but the printerobjected to the questionable nature of one of the stories("The Gallants"), and in time a host of other problematicpassages and phrases raised the ire and concern of various interested parties. By 1909, Joyce had given up on Richardsand signed a contract with Maunsel and Roberts, but thisproved to be an even greater waste of time and energy, ashis new editor George Roberts insisted on censoring moreand more passages, even to the point of insisting that thename of every Dublin commercial establishment mentionedin the work be given a new fictional identity.

The angry author eventually exacted revenge in the time-honored way of writers in general and Joyce in particular:he used his art to ridicule his adversary. In a broadsidepublished at his own expense, Joyce lampooned his overlycautious editor.

He sent me a book ten years ago;I read it a hundred times or so,Backwards and forwards, down and up,Through both ends of a telescope…Shite and onions! Do you think I’ll printThe name of the Wellington Monument,Sydney Parade and Sandymount tram,Downes’s cakeshop and Williams’s jam?I'm damned if I do—I'm damned to blazes!Talk about Irish Names of Places!...

In an even bolder move, Joyce wrote to King George V toget his blessing for a contested section the book—aremarkable step, given the insult to the monarch’s grand-mother, Queen Victoria, in the passage under consideration. A secretary at Buckingham Palace responded with a dismissivenote stating the King found it "inconsistent with rule" to passverdict on such matters. Joyce, always willing to spin factsto suit his interests, interpreted this as an indication that hisstory had not given offense to the House of Windsor.

Joyce may have felt better after scoring these points, but theyhardly improved his relations with Roberts or moved his bookany closer to publication. After more rejections, he eventuallycame back full circle to Grant Richards, who was now willingto take a chance on Dubliners. Finally, a decade after he first announced his plans for a collection of epliceti, James Joyce'sfirst book of prose fiction showed up in bookstores in June1914, just a few days before the outbreak of World War I.

Dubliners seems like tame fare nowadays, but the book stoodout for its frankness and psychological realism back at the timeof its release, especially in the context of an Irish literary culturewhere the two dominant influences were the Catholic Churchand Celtic revivalist pride. By this time, James Joyce had lefthis native Ireland far behind, and would never return. But eventhose who merely judged Dubliners by its stories, and knewnothing of the author’s self-imposed exile, would have beenstruck by how much they owed to continental European trends. Joyce himself had aligned himself early on with the aesthetic of Henrik Ibsen, but we can also see elements of Flaubert,d’Annunzio, Zola and other writers who had few followers inDublin. The spirit of Chekhov also seems to hover over thesestories, although Joyce claimed he had not read the Russian'sworks at this time. Nowadays admirers speak of Joyce as the quintessential Irish author of the 20th century, but to his contemporaries he represented everything that was opposedto home-grown Irish culture and values. In Dubliners, despiteall the local color (and names of commercial establishments),Joyce made clear at every turn that his vision for Irish fictioninvolved modernization and retrofitting on the continental model.

Joyce was often forced, in the course of these pages, to presentthe raw realities of his stories in indirect or roundabout ways—otherwise they would not have been published at all. But thebook is, strange to say, even more powerful and realisticbecause of areas of silence within the text. After all, the Dublinthat Joyce was attempting to capture in prose was filled with characters whose public behavior and statements were at oddswith their private activities. So when Mrs. Mooney, in "TheBoarding House," finds a husband for her daughter bydeliberately putting the girl in a compromising situation….well,of course, she won't dare state openly what she has plannedall along, even when plotting out the details with her child. Andwhen Eliza and Nannie Flynn, in "The Sisters" remain guardedly vague about the struggles their brother Father James Flynnfaced in fulfilling his responsibilities as a priest, this discretion—full of ominous hints—is both plausible and accentuates thesense of existential foreboding that inhabits the story.

But Joyce is more than a chronicler of secret scandal. In"Araby" he captures the longings of adolescence withbittersweet poignancy. In "Ivy Day in the Committee Room"he delivers one of the great fictional accounts of political campaigning, and in just a few pages draws in all thecontradictory elements—idealism, rivalry, expediency,ennui—that come together on election day for those whohave worked at the grassroots level in such contests. "AMother" is about a parent who wants to push the musicalcareer of her daughter, but on her own unrelenting terms;with a slight change of setting, this story could be just aspersuasive if set in the current day.

But Joyce saves the best for last. "The Dead," which closesout Dubliners, is the longest and most ambitious of his stories,and deservedly ranks among the dozen or so most importantworks of modern short fiction in English. A small party offriends and family serves as a vehicle for Joyce to developmany of the subjects and themes that would dominate hisfiction for decades to come—including cuckoldry, religion,Irish nationalism, the challenge of foreign values, the power ofsong, the persistence of memory and, above all (as the story'stitle suggests) death and dissolution. The ease with which he develops these themes, while simultaneously orchestratingthe festive activities of more than a dozen vividly-developed characters, is awe-inspiring. And, all the while, he is buildingup his narrative for a tragic epiphany in the final page. Joycewould never write a conventional plot- and character-drivennovella of this type again in his life. But it is hard to imaginethat he could have constructed a better one.

Why would a young author at the dawn of his career focusso closely on death—a concern that both begins and endsDubliners? The subject seemed to afflict Joyce at a deeppsychic level during this period of his life. In a letter fromAugust 19, 1906, he wrote of suffering from disturbing night-mares: "horrible and terrifying dreams” of "deaths, corpses, assassinations in which I take an unpleasant prominent part." He was residing in Rome at the time, struggling to make aliving as a bank clerk, and the city itself seemed to echo hisnight visions. He enjoyed comparing Rome to a cemetery—itwas made up, he insisted, of "the flowers of death, ruins, pilesof bones, and skeletons." This thought was repeated againand again in his conversations and correspondence. In a letterto Stanislaus, he proclaimed: "Rome reminds me of a manwho lives by exhibiting to travelers his grandmother’s corpse."

Then again, Joyce had his own family corpses to display—albeit in the form of fiction. Joyce's alter ego Stephen Dedalusis confronted by the ghost of his mother in Ulysses, and wecan only wonder at what visions the author had of his owndeceased mother, who had died in August 1903, that causedhim to incorporate these elements associated with horror talesinto his modernistic novel. The death of Joyce’s brotherGeorge in 1902 also weighed heavily on him (and he wouldname his own son Giorgio after his sibling). Adding to this melancholy note, his lover Nora Barnacle also had her ownintimate stories of death to share—her two previous boyfriendshad died while courting her, Michael Feeney of typhoid at age16, Michael Bodkin of tuberculosis at 20. At the convent whereshe worked, Nora had even earned the nickname of "the man-killer." Joyce found himself in the strange situation of feelingjealousy for dead rivals, but in a manner typical of his process, responded by finding a way of transforming this anxiety intofiction. It was in this frame of mind that Joyce, with intimationsof mortality assailing him from all angles, set out to write "TheDead" shortly after his return to Trieste from Rome.

Some may carp that this story—and indeed all of Dubliners—is given undeserved notoriety, solely because it is assignedin classrooms by teachers who fear that Joyce's more dauntinglater works would be too hard for their students to digest. Butmake no mistake, this is not Joyce light, or Irish Lit forBeginners. Those who grasp the full scope of the forces atwork in these may pages, may even be more shaken bytheir implications than by the ostentatious avant-garde effectsof Ulysses or Finnegans Wake.

So don’t read this book as a stepping-stone to the "harder"Joyce books. Dubliners is no preparatory effort leadingtoward something more fully realized. You might even bewise to come to this book at the end of your Joycean studies. It is after all a work obsessed with the endgame. If Ulysses isthe book recounting the epic struggles of a single day andFinnegans Wake the literary equivalent of a long, deep sleepreviving in an ever-recurring cycle with each dawn, Dublinersis the even darker approach into a far more opaque night, onefrom which there is no renewal. As such, it belongs on the shortlist of masterful fictions about the looming void inherent in thehuman condition—Death in Venice, The Death of Ivan Ilyich,The Wings of the Dove and a handful of other works come tomind. The fact that it came from a brash writer at the beginningof his career only adds to the marvel of its mature resignation.